Classics is an upcoming book reader for iPhone and iPod touch that attempts to …

Among the possibilities opened up by iPhone OS 2.0, reading books on the iPhone has emerged as a fairly popular one. Though the debate rages between fans of the printed page and those who prefer digital shelves, Classics is a new book-reading iPhone app that hopes to unite the two factions by recreating that familiar page-turning feel. We spoke with co-creator Phill Ryu, then curled up with a blanket and a cup of tea to find out whether Classics can replace our paperbacks.

Classics takes the higher of two roads when it comes to getting books onto the iPhone. Instead of providing single books or collections, like Jules Verne's (iTunes Link), that are cobbled together with purple type on a sky blue background (I'm surprised Comic Sans isn't involved), Ryu and co-creator Andrew Kaz opted to take the library approach. Classics launches to display a virtual bookshelf stocked with 12 titles from the public domain, including Alice in Wonderland, Paradise Lost, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Huckleberry Finn, and The Time Machine. From just this initial launch screen, the attention to user interface, style, and overall experience figuratively clobbers the user over the head with a copy of War & Peace. The bookshelves almost feel warm, and Ryu told Ars that the covers for nearly every book (save for Alice and Paradise) were illustrated from scratch by David Lanham.

Books can be reorganized via a simple tap, drag, and drop operation, though titles cannot be hidden or deleted in this 1.0 release. Once you have settled on a book to read, tapping its cover will cause the book to levitate off its shelf—as well as a shadow to be cast on the other shelves and titles—as Classics takes a couple seconds to prepare the selected tome for reading. It is an appreciated bit of UI flair that enriches Classics' experience and offers some eye candy while the app performs heavy lifting in the background.

Once a book is opened, the attention paid to detail does not stop, as the actual experience of reading and turning pages is Classics' primary focus. Serifed text renders beautifully against a familiar light-khaki page on the iPhone's 163ppi display. There are no overlay toolbars or see-through popup controls, and the only two buttons presented while reading allow for returning to the bookshelves and accessing the current book's table of contents. Unfortunately, there are no options for searching or quickly skipping to a specific page.

Everything about Classics' reading experience is custom designed by Kaz, and the application's various contributors, including David Lanham, Sebastian De Wit, Daniel Goffin, Kevin Capizzi, Ernest Liu, and Austin Sarner. In fact, "The only standard UI element in Classics is the welcome message popup," Ryu told us. "Everything else is custom, but we tried to design these elements to be familiar to anyone who's used an iPhone."

Classics brings a unique digital
perspective to turning the page

The most interesting aspect of Classics' highly customized experience is the "tactile page flip," as Ryu called it, that occurs when flipping pages. Eschewing the endless column of text that readers simply scroll through, Classics requires you to literally swipe your finger from right to left to flip the page. After spending some time to finally read Alice in Wonderland, I found the effect to be strangely comforting, as if Classics literally stuffed a paperback just below the iPhone's 3.5-inch glass display, and its pages were somehow responding to the capacitive feedback from my finger. Ryu says it took two months just to get this effect working nicely, and further enhancements were made while I tested private betas to increase the page flip's reliability and responsiveness. In fact, the animation is so fine tuned that the page can follow your finger if you slowly drag it back and forth across the right half of your iPhone's display.

Accompanied by a satisfying sound effect (that cannot be disabled, at least not yet) and a bookmark that slides down from above when "closing" a book, Classics' page flip and overall UI are arguably things of gimmicks and flashy tricks. Still, they come the closest to recreating the familiar analog experience of flipping through a real book in a digital age, and the simple act of swiping a finger to turn a page feels comforting and natural in both new and old contexts. Of course, hardcore tactile mainstays, such as my wife, may not be wooed, even by the level of page flipping detail that Classics employs. However, if you've been looking for a digital book reader, but an endless column of purple text hasn't quite inspired you to shelve your classic tomes on a real world bookshelf, Classics' approach is definitely worth a look.

On the downside, Classics certainly faces some challenges, both in terms of features and fundamental problems with the overall marketplace. For starters, Classics lacks any kind of features for searching a book, quickly skipping to a specific page, or automatically opening the last-read book to your bookmark when re-entering the app (manually opening a book, however, will return you to your bookmark). Other library-based book reading apps for iPhone OS, such as Stanza, certainly win out if you're looking for an extensive feature set and lots of customization options. While Stanza's reading experience isn't nearly as stylized and nostalgia-trouncing as that of Classics, it has a Cover Flow mode for browsing books, font and color customization, and even includes a full text search. Stanza can also accept new books from a desktop client, or download from a variety of DRM-free libraries while on-the-go.

A bookmark slides in from the top
when you're done reading

Still, Stanza, Classics, and any other competition are encumbered by the fact that Apple hasn't enabled a method in iTunes or on iPhone for developers to provide modern titles in a protected format. If you're a fan of classic literary works, you're in luck, especially since Ryu says that a future Classics update will include quite a few more titles (each of which need to be formatted and optimized for Classics' UI). But Classics probably won't be the Kindle-killing app that many iPhone owners have been waiting for, at least not until some sort of aforementioned book delivery service arrives.

All that said, Classics is an impressive book application for iPhone, and one that easily takes the crown for "most Mac-like iPhone book reader." With a polished UI that probably gets as close as possible to making books feel "real" on a 21st century gadget, I can see Classics being a hit with customers who are actively looking for the missing link between the old and new ways of reading books.

If you would like more info and a demo video of Classics (it's not yet available on the App Store), check out its website, ClassicsApp.com. For a limited time, Classics will sell for an introductory price of $2.99 once it lands in the iTunes App Store, which includes all of its 12 inaugural titles and any more that are provided in free upgrades.

Update: Commenters and our own John Siracusa pointed out that eReader, a long-standing purveyor of ebooks old and new, is in fact quite live and well on the iPhone. eReader offers a free iPhone app (iTunes link) that is compatible with its vast catalog of DRM-wrapped titles, including all the new releases that most other iPhone book readers, including Classics, can't provide. While I haven't tried eReader out yet, its screenshots certainly aren't encouraging from a sheer user experience standpoint. If you're gunning to bring new releases in digital form on your iPhone, though, eReader looks like a viable option.